This article originally appeared in UnHerd.
By Eric Kaufmann, July 4, 2024
Results of the French legislative elections show something surprising: nearly a third of voters under 25 back Marine Le Pen’s national populist Rassemblement National (RN), led by the youthful Jordan Bardella.
Meanwhile, closer to home, a new JL Partners poll of British 16- and 17-year-olds shows that fully 23% of this school-age group would vote, if given the opportunity, for Nigel Farage’s immigration-restrictionist Reform UK. Labour’s manifesto commitment to lower the voting age to 16 could therefore prove a boon to the Right-wing party.
Given that British young people have also moved over 20 points in favour of single-sex toilets over unisex ones since August 2022 and by a similar amount on the issue of immigration being too high, the conservative drift is becoming increasingly visible.
Similarly, in Norway, where 70% of schools across the country hold mock elections, voting for the populist Right (+12) and centre-right (+9) is up a whopping 21 points, reaching 54%. Meanwhile, support for the Left and Greens is down to the point that the centre-right leader Ola Svenneby announced:“I think we can declare the Greta Thunberg generation dead.”
In the recent European elections, the green parties and Left suffered while the populists and centre-right gained. What’s more, support for the populist Right among young adults was up 10 points or more in France, Germany and elsewhere. Alarmed, many in the progressive and mainstream commentariat have moved to ad hoc explanations around the cost of housing, the pandemic or lower levels of happiness.
These results dovetail with findings from the United States, where a recent New York Times-Siena poll shows Donald Trump on 40% among the under-30s, closing in on the 46% supporting Joe Biden. This represents a dramatic narrowing of the 24-point gap that Biden enjoyed among this age group in 2020.
But we should not get carried away. After all, this is the generation which insists that not only is Israel primarily to blame for the Gaza crisis, but that it should not exist at all — even as the public thinks the opposite. In Britain, Zoomers are split evenly between those who believe J.K. Rowling’s publisher should drop her and those who say it shouldn’t, while only a small minority of those aged over 45 wants her cancelled. As I show in my new book Taboo, Zoomers are far more woke than their elders.
In addition, glance a bit harder at those New York Times numbers and you will find that the under-25s lean 38-17 liberal-to-conservative compared to 19-38 among the over-65s. Trump’s support stems mainly from those with weak or moderate ideological commitments reacting to an aged Biden.
More detailed analysis of results from across a majority of countries voting in the European elections reveals that the under-25s were the least likely to vote for the populist Right and most likely to support the greens and centre-left.
It may be that young people in parts of Western Europe are shifting Right while those in the continent’s East and South move Left. Yet even in countries such as France, the bigger picture among youth is polarisation rather than a shift to the Right. As John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times demonstrates, 33% of those under 25 voted for RN whereas nearly half (48%) opted for the far-Left Nouveau Front Populaire. In fact, adding together extremes and the moderates, young people lean further Left than any other age group and are twice as Left-wing as the elderly. So the story appears to be one of young people polarising within a Left-leaning youth political culture.
It is well-known in political science that new generations have shallower political allegiances. In Europe, as in Britain, members of Generation Z are also coming of age in a more fluid and fragmented party system, rather than one based on established class- and faith-based party loyalties to social democracy, Christian democracy, Conservative or Labour. Even in the hyper-partisan United States, the class basis of the main parties has eroded in recent decades while the link between race and partisanship is loosening. In this environment, we should expect young people to flee established parties more than older people. Despite its polarisation, Gen Z still leans towards progressivism.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham, Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Insitute, and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July)
